A flying visit to Johannesburg this past week showed up a little progress:

Cottage kitchen installed.

The counter tops in the cottage, guest suite and main house are in Caesarstone, colour; panecotta. Although I think chose these handles, I now want to change them…

Kitchen from another angle.

West Boundary Wall going up.

Through the opening of this temporary gate, you can see the boundary wall down the western side of the property. After endless trouble from our neighbour, including veiled threats, we have resorted to building this wall within the boundary line on our own property.

Sandbags outlining the pool.

The pool company, Curtis Pools, has started work. They have ‘outlined’ the pool with sandbags for now while the filling in of the surrounding garden continues.

Cottage has been painted and the veranda tiled.

Pavement/Sidewalk View of cottage.

The picture above is probably my favourite from the past week as it looks like something is nearing completion at last. A concerted effort has finally been made to clean up the pavement. The board in front of the tree is the pool company’s advertisement. The square to the left of the gate is the door in front of the electricity meter board and will be painted the same colour as the wall. If you look carefully at the top of the wall to the right of the gate, you can see that the electric fencing has been installed. We’ve tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible.

And finally, with reference to the photograph of the patio doors in my previous post, I came across the photo below in a magazine recently. It shows rather well what the finished product of our doors should eventually look like.

Example of completed stacking patio doors.

At this stage it’s hard to imagine that our veranda and garden will ever even vaguely resemble this, but hopefully we’re moving forward inch by inch.

With the focus of my attention having been so fully on moving house for the past several weeks, I haven’t been keeping up very well with progress on the building. It is a relief to be able to concentrate on the new house again. Below is a collection of photographs showing more of less how things looked when we left Johannesburg last Saturday:

Electric Sliding Cottage Gate Installed. To be painted white.

The emphasis for the past two months has been on getting the cottage completed so that the office can function again from a fixed base. The ‘box’ fitted into the wall to the right of the gate (for those of you overseas), is the electricity meter board for the entire property. Meter Readers, who carry keys to these boxes, are supposed to do regular readings.

Cottage Flooring going in.

When it came to the wooden flooring, I have to admit to having been an absolute sucker for marketing. I have loved all the Oggie flooring print advertisements since I first became aware of them. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a room photographed for one of their adverts that I haven’t wanted to move into.

Oggie Ads

A visit to their showroom, right back in the beginning when we first started this project, confirmed for me that Oggie floors were the way to go. And so far, I’ve not been disappointed. The installers worked beautifully and the floors look great. We chose oak planks in grey mist finish.

Flooring looking good.

Cottage Second Bedroom, South Facing Window.

Above is an inside view of the re-positioned window in the second bedroom of the cottage. The carpeting has also been laid in the two bedrooms and since this photo was taken, the skirting boards have been installed.

2nd skylight on the left installed and small west facing window.

The west facing wall of the cottage looked a little ‘blank’ to begin with, especially from the outside, so we decided, quite late, to add a small west-facing window which you can see in the photo above. You can also see the two skylights; one west facing and one north facing. We have used Velux skylights throughout the cottage, guest suite and house. We had one in our previous home which we loved and we’re very familiar with them in England. They all open and they don’t leak. All the skylights have blinds. We’ve gone with manually operated blinds as they’re simpler and perhaps there is less to go wrong…. We’ve had expert service from Wolfgang Hinze who has the sole agency for Velux in Johannesburg.

Tiling underway in the upstairs cottage bathroom.

The cottage has a very compact downstairs guest bathroom (a toilet and basin – sink for the Americans…) and a small bathroom upstairs comprising a basin, toilet and a shower over a bathtub. We’re using the same white subway tiles in all the bathrooms on the property. This little bathroom needs a sliding door and we’re having a some trouble extracting this from the door company. They have supplied the door but seem to have stalled over the sliding mechanism.

The start of the kitchenette cupboards in the guest suite.

As soon as the cottage is finished and ready for occupation, we’re moving the pressure onto to the guest suite. Once that is complete, we might have a place to stay when travelling back to Johannesburg for site meetings etc. The photographs do not show the sloping ceilings very clearly but you can work out where the slope begins from where the white paint starts.

The small windows above the counter echo those in the main house kitchen. The boundary wall down the east side is very close to the windows. Close enough to have wall-mounted pots for herbs growing just outside. At the very least, I will have some sort of garden decoration mounted on the wall beyond the windows.

Taken from living room, looking south through the library.

It was good to be able, finally, to get a sense of this space, looking from the living room, south through the library. For over a year, this double door space has been boarded up and the library space has been used as a site office. Eventually there will be sliding doors in this space. Again, while all the doors in the main house have been delivered and installed, we are still waiting for these. Sliding doors seem to equal delays for some unknown reason.

Taken from library sliding door opening, looking north, through living area and patio to garden.

Now this opening has been boarded up again as we’re using the space as storage for the office furniture that we hope to get moved into the cottage this coming week. So below is what the library looked like on Friday…

Library used for storage.

Below is a reminder of what the north library wall should one day look like:

Shelves (white) will surround the sliding doors between the library and living room areas.

The sliding doors (when they arrive) will slide behind the shelving; ie between the back of the shelving and the wall.

Compacting the front (north) garden.

The level of the front garden has been raised considerably but there is still quite a way to go. I am reasonably satisfied that I will not hit broken bricks and other rubble each time I try to plant something, having been very specific about this from the start. I’ve watched this process carefully over the past few weeks and they seem to be doing a very thorough job.

The pool company is supposed to move on site in about a week, so finishing this is important.

Recent Site Meeting.

The Patio Stacking Doors in place.

Most of the time, I expect these doors to be open and because veranda space is important to me, I thought carefully about having them at all. But with downsizing to a house with effectively one open-plan living room, being able to use the outside veranda space in all weather is very useful. There will be fixed glass panes in the curved spaces above the doors.

7 Wheelbarrows Hanging on the Wall…

And someone, somewhere in the chaos of this building site seems to have a sense of style!

It’s funny, the places that writing will take you. Having never given it much of a thought in the past half a century, the nursery rhyme ‘I wish I lived in a caravan’ spooled through my head on repeat for the whole of last week and much of the week before that. So last night I googled it and found it was actually regarded as a poem and was written by someone called W. B Rands. I remember the illustration vividly and my ‘Hilda Boswell Treasury of Nursery Rhymes’, dog-eared and somewhat worse for wear, is one book that has survived many culls and charity book sale appeals but is right now inaccessible to me. It is packed away in one of the approximately 100 boxes that have gone into storage so I’m unable to reproduce the picture here. But it’s not the picture that kept running through my head, it’s the sentiment: “I wish I lived in a caravan With a horse to drive, like the pedlar-man! Where he comes from nobody knows Or where he goes to, but on he goes.” That was the first verse. On Google I discovered several more verses and found the last one oddly relevant to me: “With the pedlar-man I’d like to roam, And write a book when I come home, All the people would read my book, Just like the Travels of Captain Hook.” By the end of last week I felt I could just about write a book, or at the very least, an article, about what to expect when you pack up a fairly big house after 20+ years of living in it.

Moving Out.

As it was.

As it became… Special packaging was constructed around the piano to move and store it.

The Doll’s House, still incomplete, also required special packaging and was the source of intense interest.

It was very hard work. It wasn’t particularly emotional or sad – in the end there really wasn’t much time left over for sentiment – it was simply exhausting and all-consuming. On just one day last week my Fitbit informed me that I had done over 13000 steps – 3000 more than my daily goal – and I had not even left the house. The packing just seemed to go on and on despite the loads that left with Joseph, with Caroline – 2 full trucks – with Hospice and with another wonderful charity called Cordis Brothers and the deliveries we made to Meals on Wheels and an Aids Orphanage.

Caroline on her way to retirement. With two grandsons and a friend.

And I know that when the time eventually comes to unpack in the new house, there will still be more to give away.

Too much stuff. But the little chair, made for an ancestor in Oxford 150 years ago, has to come along.

I never want to own so much stuff again. For now, the furniture destined for the new house is in storage with the removal company as are rather a lot of boxes. And still more boxes – because we were not ready in time – are stored in the homes of several long-suffering friends. The three unsuspecting cats are all boarding in a cattery and this has left me more aggrieved than any other aspect of the building delays. Finally, last Saturday, a day later than planned, we were ready to hand over the house keys and – with Daisy squashed into a corner of the back seat – we set off on the long journey to Cape Town. Ironically, it was the thought of the open road that kept me going over the last few days of packing. I found myself longing for the wide open spaces of the Free State and the Karoo and although it has been inconvenient not being able to move from one house directly into another, in the end I think this hiatus period will be a good thing.

Karoo Skies

My love of long road trips and of driving often draws sceptical looks but recently I discovered in the writing of Antony Osler, an echo of myself: “I love the empty road. My eyes attend to everything but don’t get caught anywhere. They see without trying. I welcome whatever comes into my field of vision, I let it all pass behind me without regret.”………………..”Just driving. Just driving and seeing. Just driving and seeing and thinking. Letting the landscape flower through me as I flow through it.” (Zen Dust, Antony Osler, Jacana Media, 2012). So it’s not only me! I feel vindicated.